Lona. Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.
In Rosmersholm Rector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’
Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community of minds; most assuredly should the man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it is to be remarked that this rôle of teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s words to her husband (A Doll’s House, p. 111): ‘I must first try to educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all assistance. Farà da se! She will educate and form herself. As though this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, in The Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling (p. 337):
Gregers. [I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.
Relling. So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?
Gregers. No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. But a true marriage it has never been.
Hjalmar. You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.
Relling. All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ... true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?
Gregers. Scarcely a single one.
Relling. Nor I, either.